


child of nature

by MathildaHilda



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Child Death, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Minor Character Death, POV Minor Character, i don't know why i wrote this but then i thought "why the fuck not"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-05-07 07:12:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19204456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: Greta Bennett came to hate the cities, even later when she traveled to the bustling town of Blackwater – a city to be as it was even then – for any last mention of the boy she had loved and raised and allowed to slip away.Had she had any form of contact with her son, maybe she would’ve told kinder tales of growing cities than the ones that she did tell him.





	child of nature

**Author's Note:**

> “Art is the child of nature in whom we trace the features of the mothers face.”  
> ― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Greta Bennett had been born poor, and perhaps she would have remained so, had her father not decided that America sounded like the country that England had once been promised to be, and ordered them all to set a sail and a dream to the land to the West.

She was the daughter of a poor enough man, and an even poorer enough woman, but her grandfather had had too much money, and had had much enough to share, and so, she paid her father’s sudden bulging pockets no mind until the night he got too drunk during the storm that took her mother’s and sister’s lives.

It wasn’t the storm itself that took her mother and sister away, but the illness that plagued the ship that had somehow quickend in the sick and dying once the rain started up – long before land was within their sights – and by then her father was far too drunk to pay his dying wife and young children much of a mind.

This especially once he proclaimed - to the other drunk and miserable bastards aboard - with which one of his own father’s precious guns he had loaded, aimed and fired.

When Greta’s mother had taken one last breath and then ceased to breathe at all, Greta had hid herself under the bunks which her father had procured for them on their travel, while the doctor and some few men had carried her mother and sister away to be buried at sea. She had not emerged even then when they entered and left, and had instead remained hidden and weeping until her father had found her and pulled her out by her ankle, her nails creating tracks in the wooden planks.

He’d held her then and had cried into her hair, but the young girl she had been back then had had no tears left to shed, and instead stared over her father’s shoulder at the empty bed and the tiny little basket that still held her little brother.

He hadn’t wept himself since the storm, and Greta, in her own grief, had left him upside the other beds, forgetting completely what could’ve been of her brother had her father been of a crueler mind.

 

Perhaps the two of them were the lucky ones, she thought to herself once her father’d let her go and she held her brother just like she’d been taught by her mother.

Perhaps they were the lucky ones, and little Emma hadn’t been, forgotten as she was in the land to which they no doubt would never return to.

Jonathan cried out for the first time since the storm that following Sunday when half the ship was away for the weekly service, up in the greater halls of the ship.

Little Lizzie never cried at all.

 

~

 

Greta Bennett was thirteen years old when she first set foot on the land of America, and had still been twelve when she’d seen it for the first time through the binoculars of a kind officer.

It had been half a day between the first sight and when they’d finally docked, and by then her father had called her Emma once and Florence another time, and almost left little Jonathan on the ship bound to return to the island they had just left, forcing the newly thirteen year old Greta to run back aboard and grab her brother’s wicker basket before the plank could be pulled back.

Greta Bennett was thirteen years old when she held her little brother in a strange land, and was already close to lose her father in the vastness of strangers in larger crowds. By then she tugged a grip on his shirt and held on as they pushed past the people looking to sell and to buy and sail far, far away, and they made it out, somewhat alive, out of the port that she’d never see again.

The ship – she read later once a kind, old man had taught her how to read – had docked in the town that could’ve been a city, had it not been so early, of Chicago, and had she known then that her son would one day return there, she would’ve told him better stories of it other than that it was loud and awful and filled with people with manure for brains.

 

(Greta Bennett came to hate the cities, even later when she traveled to the bustling town of Blackwater – a city to be as it was even then – for any last mention of the boy she had loved and raised and allowed to slip away.

Had she had any form of contact with her son, maybe she would’ve told kinder tales of growing cities than the ones that she _did_ tell him.)

 

The three of the Bennett’s that still remained, travelled for a while and stayed at every inn in every town that allowed her father to work and drink everything up before sunup the next day, until her father suddenly decided that farmers was something they’d become.

It’d been something they’d been and something it seemed the world wanted them to remain, so, all she did then was nod, and allow her father to buy a plot of land that was never going to work as anything but grazing country.

 

(She didn’t know that then, but her husband did tell her such later, before their boy was born and they had travelled the little stretch between the homestead and their own, much larger home, in a county that hadn’t seen rain in half a year.

“ _It ain’t too good country, that which your Pa bought, darlin’.”_

 _“And how come you say that_?” She’d asked him, all hot and improper in the back on the covered carriage, no doubt reading her husband’s mind about the fact that they’d be the ones inheriting it, should Jonathan not want it.

 _“Rocks the size of cattle is just one of the proofs that it ain’t good country_.” He’d said, and had, for once during the whole of them knowing each other, looked unsure about just what kind of family he’d married himself into.)

 

By the time her father had finished the little homestead, that at the time reminded her more of the cabin they’d all shared in the ship than a real homestead, Jonathan was old enough to hammer a nail and a finger to the doorpost, and her father was getting all the less drunk and all the more distant deep into town on other matters.

You’d think, once his home was finished, he’d’ve stayed more at home than away, but if there was something the man had always had his eyes on, it’d been money.

So, Greta wasn’t too surprised when he wandered onto their grounds with a woman, a pack of sheep and a cow in tow, but she was all the more surprised to see the young boy trailing behind the caravan.

He’d been young, pale and with a head full of hair that was paler than the suntanned grass along their fences, and he would’ve looked sick, hadn’t it been for the rosy color to his cheeks and the wild look in his eyes.

That boy, lovingly named Dobbie by her stuttering little brother, had been Greta’s first.

She’d pushed him from the low cliff by the pond when they were both no taller than the apple tree, and kissed him under that very same tree when they’d both been hiding from Jonathan and Dobbie’s little brother, both young and blushing and giggling.

He’d been her first. And, then he’d died.

 

~

 

Greta didn’t blame the horse, but she did blame the owner of the horse – who was hung by the deputy the following day on the counts of ‘misuse of property’, all the courtesy of the deputy being the boy’s uncle by marriage – and Greta herself refused to leave Carlton before she’d seen the man swing herself.

To say that something sweet was inscribed on the boy’s stone, all of sixteen and already dead, would’ve been a bit of a dream.

The inscription simply read; ‘trampled by horse’, and then nothing more than a name and two dates.

 

(Later, when forty years had passed with little excitement in the town other than that sole incident, a young boy, yet unscarred, would laugh at the _‘idiot’s luck’_ , and then be forcibly dragged away by the neck by Greta van der Linde’s, née Bennett, son himself.

Now, her boy didn’t know that his mother had known the trampled one, but he had enough sense to use the sentence on the stone as a lesson for the boy who’d almost swung by his own neck because of his own stupidity.)

 

Toby McNeil had been her first, and the girl she named after her mother had also been her first.

Florence Bennett was Robert Bennett’s youngest daughter by law, and his oldest daughter’s own daughter by nature, because not even a man such as Mister Bennett dared to send a young little girl out to face the world alone, no matter how much of a bastard the man was every other time in his life.

Florence Bennett turned five, and then they’d buried her with the stuffed rabbit she’d been given by her grandmother and had loved so very much.

Greta Bennett didn’t blame the horse, or the boy who’d wanted to put a ring on her finger once they both had money and age to give to another, but she did blame herself for dreaming that she, of all people, could have something of her own.

 

~

 

She’d been nearing her twenty-first birthday when her dead daughter’s grandmother had dressed her up the same as a porcelain doll and made her curtesy and dance silly and useless dances at a ball for a cause she weren’t quite sure she understood.

It still didn’t make sense when she saw the boy with the auburn hair and the sun kissed skin, and it made even less sense when he looked at her and smiled at her with a smile that, impossibly enough, reached the far reaches of his ears.

Greta didn’t think, in all her years, that she’d ever seen anyone smile that big and wide and so without a lie in sight.

And, she definitely didn’t think that she, once in her life, would smile just so wide as he smiled at her right then.

 

~

 

Missus McNeil curled her hair for that first meeting, helped her into the violet dress with the silver ribbons and put the blush on her cheeks herself, shooing out any maid that thought they could do a better job, and a part of Greta felt like she was betraying the boy she thought she had loved.

She told Missus McNeil such, and the old crone laughed, patted her cheek and told her to smile. They had both loved Toby, but it simply weren’t meant to be, she told the worried girl, who had all but forgotten what it’d been like to meet a boy alone, even if it, this time, were in the company of other people with more money and much finer dressing.

Missus van der Linde had looked distraught once they’d taken their tea – which the boy, Adrian, had poured brandy down the cup in just the way that only Greta could see – and Greta told them herself that she had carried a child to term and been unwed at the time.

The boy, half-drunk on something other than brandy it seemed, had only smiled in something that didn’t look at all like regret or shame in wanting to meet her, and told his mother something in a language Greta didn’t understand.

She didn’t understand it, but his mother’s reaction didn’t seem to change, and she seemed about ready to hit the boy upside the head should he have suggested whatever he’d said again.

But, Greta smiled, took them each in hand, and accepted the gift the boy passed between them before they all took their leave.

Between the families, the pair didn’t meet up until the week after. Between the two of them, she took him riding in the evenings and he read to her in the midday sun, just out of sight of anyone that might tell who they were.

Between the two of them, this was as sweet as it would get for quite some time.

 

~

 

It took five months of planning, and careful meetings and shy exchanges of letters and gifts through a mail carrier that seemed none the wiser but who probably was, before Adrian van der Linde finally did meet Greta Bennett’s father and asked him to marry her.

It took five months, and thirty minutes, for Robert Bennett to accept on the account that a share of the promised wedding penning, would go to the rundown farm that Mister Bennett owned and managed with the oldest of his two sons.

(The second son was due to the courtesy of the new Missus Bennett, once Missus McNeil took more interest in Mister Bennett’s daughter than in the man himself.)

It was agreed upon within half an hour.

They were married less than two months later.

 

~

 

Dutch van der Linde, in his later years, spoke very little of his daddy apart from the fact that he’d died fighting in a Pennsylvanian field at the height of the War.

He spoke little of his mother save for the gravestone down by Blackwater, and that one little meeting he’d had with Uncle Jonathan, some few months after an uncle he’d never met had passed away down the same way.

But he didn’t speak at all of the child that preceded him and the one that came after, once home was home and too much ruckus was already being stirred up both up North and down South.

He didn’t speak of young Sally van der Linde, who climbed the tallest trees in the garden to pick the lemons the workers couldn’t reach and crawled down into the foxholes before the dogs could find them and bark up a storm, and got her finest dresses smeared in dirt and shit.

He didn’t talk about little Herman van der Linde, whose favorite pastime was stealing the cookies from the cook and getting chased out of the kitchen with a wooden spoon and Dutch curse words, and who read all the books he shouldn’t in the home’s library.

He never talked about his mother’s and father’s whispered conversations once June came around and his mother seemed to be filled with grief neither living child could understand.

He never did, because the only family he had left once he heard from them again, down Blackwater way, was Herman and his brother had inherited most things save for the hunting dogs once momma’d moved down South to, maybe, seek out the child that didn’t wish to be confined to his mother’s safe and true enough home.

 

He talked to Hosea about the day his father went to war and came home twice, and then never came home.

He talked to Arthur about the grandfather he’d never met and who’d been every bit as much of a peasant as Arthur’s folk had, and that it weren’t anything wrong in being from a peasant folk.

He talked to John about the mother he’d loved but never understood, when John was young and confused once home had become something true and safe.

 

~

 

The late Missus van der Linde had loved her son, but he’d been far from the boy she had hoped for once he’d come wailing into the world.

She had loved him, and Sally and Herman, but soon enough, love runs out.

Not the love felt. But, the love you loved.

 

~

 

Sally van der Linde loved her mother’s hunting dogs and her mother’s prized thoroughbred, loved the freedom of woods and plains, and the little cabin that she built in the woods. She did love her brother, but no one ever asks for relations when one doesn’t use their full name.

Herman van der Linde loved the safety of home and the safety of simplicity, and only ever saw his brother once after he ran off and became the infamous man Herman distanced himself from ever knowing or being in relation to, once people started asking.

And Dutch was Dutch, until the very end.

 

He loved them all; both loved them too much and loved them too little, but sometimes, a family found is better than a family born.

It didn’t matter what the men believed once he told them he’d never shared much love for his older brother before they parted ways; Herman van der Linde did cry once he read the papers, which proclaimed the second of Greta van der Linde’s living children deceased in a gunfight of the worst kind.

 

(No one ever learns the truth of Dutch van der Linde.

And, that is perhaps how it should be.)

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on [Tumblr](http://mathildahilda.tumblr.com) here!


End file.
